The topological electronic phase distinguished by the latent topology inside materials is the award-winning subject of the Nobel Prize in Physics 2016, research on which is now being actively conducted all over the world.

In the topological electronic phase, an electronic state peculiar to the topological electronic phase occurs at the surface of materials (appearance), reflecting topology hidden inside materials (substances). For this reason, topology of a substance has been judged only by its appearance.

A joint research group succeeded in observing the topological phase transition in which a material changes to the topological electronic phase by using soft X-rays, light suitable for determining the topology of materials by their substances rather than by their appearance.

Since this research achievement enables direct determination of the essential topology hidden inside materials without judging the surface of the materials, it is expected that employing this technique will lead to the discovery of more diverse topological electronic phases.

###

This result was achieved by the research group of Assistant Professor Kenta Kuroda and Associate Professor Takeshi Kondo of the Institute for Solid State Physics, the University of Tokyo (Director Masashi Takigawa), in collaboration with Team Leader Ryotaro Arita (RIKEN Center for Emergent Matter Science), Assistant Professor Masayuki Ochi (the Graduate School of Science, Osaka University), Senior Scientist Takayuki Muro (Japan Synchrotron Radiation Research Institute), Deputy Director-General Hideyuki Kitazawa (National Institute for Materials Science) and Principle Researcher Yoshinori Haga (Japan Atomic Energy Agency).

Osaka University was founded in 1931 as one of the seven imperial universities of Japan and now has expanded to one of Japan's leading comprehensive universities. The University has now embarked on open research revolution from a position as Japan's most innovative university and among the most innovative institutions in the world according to Reuters 2015 Top 100 Innovative Universities and the Nature Index Innovation 2017. The university's ability to innovate from the stage of fundamental research through the creation of useful technology with economic impact stems from its broad disciplinary spectrum.

Die letzten 5 Focus-News des innovations-reports im Überblick:

A new assessment of NASA's record of global temperatures revealed that the agency's estimate of Earth's long-term temperature rise in recent decades is accurate to within less than a tenth of a degree Fahrenheit, providing confidence that past and future research is correctly capturing rising surface temperatures.

The most complete assessment ever of statistical uncertainty within the GISS Surface Temperature Analysis (GISTEMP) data product shows that the annual values...

Physicists at the University of Basel are able to show for the first time how a single electron looks in an artificial atom. A newly developed method enables them to show the probability of an electron being present in a space. This allows improved control of electron spins, which could serve as the smallest information unit in a future quantum computer. The experiments were published in Physical Review Letters and the related theory in Physical Review B.

The spin of an electron is a promising candidate for use as the smallest information unit (qubit) of a quantum computer. Controlling and switching this spin or...

With a quantum coprocessor in the cloud, physicists from Innsbruck, Austria, open the door to the simulation of previously unsolvable problems in chemistry, materials research or high-energy physics. The research groups led by Rainer Blatt and Peter Zoller report in the journal Nature how they simulated particle physics phenomena on 20 quantum bits and how the quantum simulator self-verified the result for the first time.

Many scientists are currently working on investigating how quantum advantage can be exploited on hardware already available today. Three years ago, physicists...

'Quantum technologies' utilise the unique phenomena of quantum superposition and entanglement to encode and process information, with potentially profound benefits to a wide range of information technologies from communications to sensing and computing.

However a major challenge in developing these technologies is that the quantum phenomena are very fragile, and only a handful of physical systems have been...